After more than 5 years, the PNR (Passengers Name Record) has been approved. The European Parliament passed it definitively the last 14 of April in order to help the European countries in the fight against terrorism. This measure, from which has been excluded Denmark, has generated a lot of controversy due to the process of personal data, but after the recent attacks in Paris and Brussels States the opinion has changed.

Since this measure was proposed in 2011, it has been practically blocked by the Parliament due to the protests of some parliamentary groups in relation to the handling of personal data, because storage was in contravention of the right to privacy. Therefore, this measure has been voted with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), a new law on protection of data updating the last one adopted in 1995, which includes for example the right to oblivion and a tighter regulation on business.

The measure is mainly based on 19 data that passengers give when they book flights such as the name, address, the destination, the means of payment, how much luggage they carry, how the reserve has been made or the possible companions. However, sensitive data are excluded such as religious beliefs, sexual orientation or race, in order to protect people’s privacy. Each country will store these data in a Unit of Information on Passengers (UIP) where they will remain for five years. Past the first six months data will remain encrypted and only could be accessed by express request from other country on an anti-terrorism investigation. The measure is going to be applied to both the intra-Community and extra-Community flights to be able to track down the so-called foreign fighters.

As a conclusion, we could say that this measure would help in many ways to track foreign fighters and to detect suspicious profiles on these issues. On the contrary, as some of the parliamentarians have pointed out, what Europeans need is to act effectively against terrorism, not having one tool for data collection.